Starting a Social Media Plan Today

Great social media isn’t created spontaneously on a whim. If your company isn’t already developing a marketing plan for social, you are a step behind your competition. Today is the perfect time to develop a plan for future social media and generate excitement for your business. One of your biggest tools for marketing in 2019 is social media. This is a cost-effective option that usually has a good return on investment, but only if start with a plan.

1. Set the Calendar

Let’s start off with the framework you need to establish now. Sit down with your calendar for the year and highlight your major events that you want to promote and drum up excitement for (new product releases, holidays, sales, retail store opening, etc.). Next, determine how far out you would like to promote each event. Some events, like surprise flash sales, will require almost no promotions beforehand, while retail store openings may require promotion months in advance.

2. Craft Your Content

Once you have your calendar set you can move on to content brainstorming. Whether you simply want to announce a product release or start a social media get way, it’s important that your messaging and imagery is clear, poignant, and on-brand. If your social media voice is matter-of-fact and professional, it wouldn’t make sense to post a goofy image to announce a sale. Social media is one of the best ways to communicate with potential customers, but you have to make sure what you communicate is worth their while. For each time frame highlighted in step 1, mark down content ideas to help you promote each event.

3. Targeting the Perfect Customer

Once you know when and what you will promote an event, the next step is to determine who you will promote it to.  With social media constantly evolving, there are now many ways to match your message to the ideal customer. Determining who you will promote your event to will be specific to your business and event—for the purposes of this article we will list several targeting methods  

• Retargeting – This method of targeting lets you place messaging in front of customers who have interacted with your website or ads in the past. Perhaps you have highlighted a slow time of the year and want to re-engage customers who have not completed conversions; retargeting is the perfect way to accomplish this.

• Hashtagging – Organic posts go out to all of your followers and fans, but adding an extra level of targeting to your organic posts can go a long way. Including popular and trending hashtags in your posts is a great way to expand your audience outside of your own followers.

• Custom Audiences – Targeting via custom audiences is a great way to target customers who you already have information about (email address, name, etc.). Using your business’s customer database you can identify a set of customers for specific messaging. For example, if a new Nintendo video game is coming out you may want to identify customers who previously bought Nintendo games and market the new game to them.

• Interest and Demographic Targeting— Targeting potential customers by interests and demographics allows you to connect to a specific group of users ranging from competitor’s customers to technology buffs.

4. Execute

This may seem oblivious, but the last step is to execute your social media plan. You’ll want to make sure all of you paid social media accounts are fully funded, your posts and campaigns are scheduled, landing pages are live, and all post have been proofread.